The WWDC 2011 keynote liveblog

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote address, which will be presented by Steve Jobs and others from Apple’s executive team, begins at 10 AM PDT. Our own Colleen Taylor will be liveblogging the action right here, along with help from Om Malik, so bookmark this page to stay on top of all the excitement. You can manually upload the page to see new info, or use an auto-reloading plugin like ReloadEvery for Firefox, Auto Refresh Plus for Chrome, or Auto Refresh for Safari.

9:31: Pictures from inside the Moscone Center

9:45: The doors are open and all 5000+ attendees are filing in, finding seats, and snapping the requisite crowd photos.

9:57: And now, our own requisite pre-keynote photos of the stage and audience at Moscone:

10:00: Standing ovation as Steve Jobs walks onto stage, 10am sharp.

10:03: Jobs says WWDC sold out within two hours. Over 5200 attendees are here today. Says hardware is the brain of our products, and software is our soul.

10:07: Phil Schiller, SVP of product marketing, takes the stage and introduces Mac OS X Lion, which has 250 features. He says he will be talking about 10 of them today.

10:13: Craig Federighi, SVP of OS X software, takes the stage to demo the first three features introduced by Schiller: multi-touch, full-screen applications, and a “mission control” app navigation feature.

10:17: Phil Schiller is back onstage following Federighi’s demo. He says the Mac App store is now the number 1 channel for buying PC software. Surpassing Best Buy, Walmart and Office Depot. The Mac App store is now built-in to Lion, with in-app purchasing and push notifications.

10:20: The 6th new feature in Lion is called “resume”– when you launch an app in Lion, it brings you right back to where you were when you quit it last. The 7th feature is “auto-save”, that saves a document automatically as you write it.

10:22: The 8th feature is “versions,” which saves each version of a document that’s been auto-saved. The feature looks a lot like Time Machine.

10:25: Federighi comes back on stage to demo Lion’s built-in version of the Mac App Store, which includes a launch pad navigation feature. He also demos the experience of working with documents in Lion, including auto-save and versions.

10:29: Schiller is back onstage. Feature #9 is “Air Drop” which allows you to share documents via a peer-to-peer WiFi based network. Using this feature allows you to drag and drop documents to other users who are running Lion’s Air Drop nearby.

10:33: Schiller announces new features to Mail in Lion, as the 10th feature update. The search function has received a major upgrade with better search features. Federighi comes back on stage once again to demo the Lion Mail features.

10:37: Schiller comes back on stage and announces additional features to the 10 he’s highlighted, such as Windows migration. He notes that the OS has more than 3000 APIs for developers. Lion will be available only within the Mac App Store, he says. Lion will be a 4GB download and can be used on all a user’s authorized Macs.

10:38: Lion will be available for $29.99, $100 less than the typical price. That gets a huge response from the crowd. It will be available on sale to everyone in July, Schiller says.

10:40: SVP of iOS software Scott Forstall takes the stage to provide some iOS numbers. He says more than 200 million iOS devices have been sold, and more than 25 million iPads have been sold to date. Over 15 billion songs have been sold in the iTunes music store, making Apple the number 1 music retailer in the world. More than 14 billion apps from the app store have been downloaded. Apple has paid out more than $2.5 billion to developers building apps for the app store.

10:45: Forstall says he’ll announce 10 new features to iOS 5. The first is a better UI for push notifications.

10:46: The new iOS has a notification center where all notifications– voicemail, emails, text messages, Facebook messages, along with stocks and weather, will be updated in one place.

10.47: You get access to the notifications by swiping your finger from top to bottom. The notifications don’t interrupt and it acts like a launcher for the app. Notification center is pretty cool.

10.48: News Center is the new production and it has major publishers who have signed up for the subscriptions. Talking about a whole lot of magazines – the usual suspects. A single place for finding all the papers and magazines in one place. It is like the iBooks, but for Magazines and Newspapers with background downloads.

10.49: And there is twitter. …We are doing a number of things – single sign-ons. Twitter is built into iPhone, iPad and you can sign-in. Logged in and don’t need to sign on again. Oh, Facebook doesn’t like that :-) It integrates with our apps – Cameras etc. You can include Twitter @username in contact list and use Twitter to update photos of your friends.

10:55: When you share an article via email on iOS Safari Reader, the entire body of the story is included in the email, not just the link. Also has added full tabbed browsing in iOS Safari– an announcement that elicited a lot of applause from the audience.

10:58: Forstall announces a new “reminders” feature added to iOS 5. Reminders app is basically a place to store to-do lists. You can associate dates and locations with these reminders– when the date arrives, or when you are geo-located within a certain place, you receive a reminder to do a certain task.

11:01: The 6th iOS announcement has to do with the camera app. iPhone 4 is the 2nd most popular camera overall used on Flickr. There is a new camera button accessible from the iPhone’s lock screen, so that even if there is a passcode set, the camera can be used without unlocking the screen. The volume up button can now be used to take a photo– an announcement that received a big whoop of applause from the crowd here.

11:03: Photos can be edited within the iPhone and iPad now– things such as red-eye reduction, and one-tap enhance are now added into the iOS camera app.

11:05: The 7th update has to do with updates to the mail application. The inbox now has drag and drop capabilities for adding email recipients, and search now includes entire message content. There is also a new feature that allows you to type easier with your thumbs by splitting the keyboard onto the right and left sides of the iPhone or iPad.

11:07: The 8th update, “PC Free”, receives a big cheer from the audience. Now, when an iPhone is taken out of the box, the setup does not prompt users to plug the device into a computer to activate the device. Software updates are now over the air, or OTA, so you no longer need to plug the phone into a computer to update the mobile device. And instead of updating the entire OS, you just download what’s changed– known as Delta updates.

11:11: The 9th announcement has to do with Game Center. Forstall says iOS’ Game Center now has 50 million users. New updates to Game Center in iOS 5 are focused on making it more social– you can add photos, etc. Now Game Center has support for turn-based games like Scrabble in the OS.

11:15: The 10th update is a new messaging service that works between all iOS customers– on iPads, iPod Touches, and iPads, called iMessage. There are now delivery receipts, optional read receipts, typing indications, and muli-device sync, 3G and WiFi support, and full encryption. Forstall demos iMessage with Apple marketing VP Greg “Joz” Joswiak. iMessage is built on Apple’s own push notification system.

11:18: Forstall goes over a few other updates beyond the 10 he delved into: AirPlay mirroring, which mirrors the iPad 2 to a TV wirelessly. Also, he said iOS has added WiFi sync to iTunes. Forstall also goes into some new developer additions, and says the company will give out iOS Developer SDKs today at the WWDC conference.

11:20: Steve Jobs takes the stage again to lots of applause. He says he’s going to talk about iCloud and jokes that “I’ll try not to blow it.”

11:22: Jobs says that the status quo of keeping all our information, such as pictures, up to date across all our devices is a broken system. “Keeping those devices in sync is driving us crazy. We’ve got a great solution to this problem… We’re going to demote the PC and Mac to being just a device, and move the center of your digital life in the cloud.”

11:25: iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices, and is completely integrated with your apps. “You might say, why should I believe them? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe,” Jobs says. He admits that MobileMe was “not our finest hour” but says that the company has learned its lesson. With iCloud they’ve built all the company’s apps from the ground up to work perfectly within this automatically synced system, he says.

11:27: iCloud will be completely free. It also won’t contain any ads.

11:30: iCloud will automatically do daily backups to the cloud over WiFi: Back up includes purchased music, apps and books, your photos and videos, your device settings, and your app data.

11:32: Jobs announces 3 more apps to iCloud– what he says are the “most innovative” aspects of the product. The first is Documents, pages that are automatically stored into the cloud and synced across all your devices.

11:33: Roger Wosner, VP of iWork takes the stage to demo the experience of iWork apps such as Keynote and Pages in iCloud.

11:37: Steve Jobs is back onstage to give more details about how documents are handled . He also announces iCloud storage APIs, so that developers can easily tie their own apps into iCloud storage.

11:40: Jobs announces PhotoStream, what he says is his favorite aspect of iCloud. This automatically syncs Photos into the cloud and across all devices. PhotoStream also works with AppleTV.

11:44: Steve Jobs takes stage again to introduce “last, but not least– iTunes in the cloud.” Eddy Cue is back onstage to demo how iTunes works in the cloud– it allows a user to sync all the songs he or she has ever purchased, on any device. Any song now purchased on any device is instantly added to all of a user’s other devices. When Cue shows this feature off it elicits a big “wow” from the crowd. Very nice.

11:50: All 9 apps that comprise iCloud are completely free, Jobs says. “We want people to see what these devices can really do, and what the software can do.”

11:52: When you upgrade your phone or buy a new phone with iOS 5, all you do is type in your user name and password, and iCloud is automatically ready to be set up. iCloud users start with 5 GB of free data, not counting songs, books, or photo streaming. Developer beta of iCloud is open today, he says. iTunes in the cloud is available today for end users for iOS 4.3. iCloud in its entirety will be shipped concurrently with iOS 5 this fall.

11:54: “There’s one more thing,” Jobs says to applause. This is “iTunes Match,” which allows users to automatically find all non-iTunes songs and albums that users have ripped themselves and match them with iTunes songs so that they can be accessed via iCloud. This scan and match service will take minutes, instead of weeks, Jobs says. These songs will be upgraded to 256 kbps AAC DRM-free, and will cost $25.99 per year.

11:57: To demonstrate how serious Apple is about its cloud efforts, Jobs shows photos of the third data center that Apple has constructed to help support its iCloud efforts. He says it’s the “most eco-friendly you can make.”

11:59: Steve Jobs exits the stage to another standing ovation from the audience, and that’s a wrap for the WWDC 2011 keynote.